Iframe with autoheight

Question

i need to autoheight an iframe with a cross domain src, i tried with javascript, but I get an "Access Denied" when I try to get the height of iframe contentWindow. anyone knows any method?

Answer 1

If you created a proxy on your server that fetched the content, JavaScript wouldn't have this restriction.

Answer 2

ItzWarty is right: the parent page cannot communicate with the child document, even to find out its height. Back in 2008, Michael Mahemoff posted a detailed overview of Cross-Domain Communication with IFrames that may provide you with some guidance.

Hope is on the way, however - HTML5 includes an improvement to this situation called "Cross-document messaging" that is supported in Firefox 3, Safari 4, Chrome 2, Opera 9.2 and even IE... 8. If your users are using only those supported browsers, you could use it.

Perhaps you could set the "scrolling" attribute on the IFRAME element to "auto" by default and test for window.postMessage - if it succeeds, set "scrolling" to "no" and use a function to size the IFRAME accordingly.

I recently dealt with a similar issue (parent page from domain.tld framing a page on blog.domain.tld) but I was able to use "the old document.domain hack" that Mahemoff described to get by, although it's not supported in Opera.

Good luck.

Answer 3

The domain issue is only one problem you face - IE8 is the other. Even if you can access the iframe, IE8 cannot accurately retrieve the body.clientHeight info. Firefox works tho...